WADs, Bots and Mods: Multiplayer FPS Games as Co-creative Media Sue Morris PhD Candidate Department of English, Media Studies and Art History University of Queensland St Lucia 4072 Queensland AUSTRALIA [email protected] ABSTRACT This paper will focus on the inter-relationships between media, technology and culture as demonstrated by the online multiplayer FPS scene, and will make explicit the degree to which game texts and associated technology facilitate culture and the formation of community, and how in turn such social structures inflect and determine the development of computer games, related Internet technologies and subsequent models for software development and distribution. Beyond the idea of “participatory media”, I argue that multiplayer FPS games have become “co-creative media”; neither developers nor players can be solely responsible for production of the final assemblage regarded as “the game”, it requires the input of both. Keywords Online games, multiplayer, first-person shooter, gaming culture, co-creative media”, mod scene, Quake, Half-Life, Counter-Strike, game development. INTRODUCTION As a new and emerging research area, computer games demand the development of new theoretical frameworks for research and analysis. In addition to the specific requirements of a new medium, the advent and rapidly rising popularity of multiplayer computer gaming creates further challenges for researchers when the text under analysis forms a locus for human interaction – structuring and mediating communication between large numbers of people, and spawning social practices and identifications within a cultural economy extending beyond the game itself. While multiplayer gaming practices develop within existing social, cultural, technological and economic structures, they are also producing significant shifts within these structures. Here I will be discussing the innovative gaming and development practices surrounding multiplayer, first-person shooter (FPS) computer games such as Quake III Arena and Half-Life Counter-Strike. Since the mid-1990s, a large and remarkably cohesive online community has developed around these games, involving hundreds of thousands of players, with up to 100,000 FPS gamers actively playing online at any one time [5]. In addition to actual gameplay, the FPS community engages in practices of game development, criticism, commentary, debate, information exchange, file-sharing and social organisation. Online access to open-source game development tools, the provision of venues for distribution and publicity of player-generated game content and modifications, the use of the online community in game testing, and increased communication between game development companies and players are currently shifting the boundaries between the traditional roles of media producers and consumers and changing the ways in which these games are made. Study of the practices surrounding multiplayer FPS games can provide insight into new and emerging models of media production, consumption and distribution, play, community formation and challenges to existing structures of social and economic power. A BRIEF HISTORY OF FPS GAMES AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF COMMUNITY The current form of the online FPS gaming culture and game development has been influenced greatly by the development, marketing and distribution methods used by the pioneers of FPS gaming, id Software. In 1992, the first FPS game, Wolfenstein 3-D was developed by a group of six young game designers working out of a one-bedroom loft apartment in Mesquite, Texas. Wolfenstein 3-D was innovative in both game design and distribution. It was the first shooting game for the PC to use a first-person point-of-view and early 3D technology to create for the player a sense of immersion in a three- dimensional space, and stood out in a gaming world populated by the platform games of Sega and Nintendo console systems. As shareware, Wolfenstein 3-D was distributed for free on bulletin board systems (BBS) and by floppy disk, and proliferated on network environments such as those in business and educational institutions and the (pre-World Wide Web) Internet. In December 1993, Wolfenstein 3-D’s developers, now known as id Software, released Doom, also initially as a shareware download (15 million copies of Doom are estimated to have been circulated worldwide since). Doom was revolutionary and culturally significant in that it was multiplayer (up to four players could play via LAN, serial connection or telephone lines) and the id developers made the unprecedented move of releasing the game’s source code to the public. This allowed gamers to make modified versions of the game, customising landscapes and game models, and creating new levels and even ‘total conversions’ – entirely new game scenarios, such as Barney Doom or Star Trek Doom. These player creations were circulated on BBSs and the Internet. Players wrote detailed documents (text files) outlining Doom gameplay strategies and game programming and modification techniques, which could be downloaded from Usenet newsgroups, the Internet and IRC (Internet Relay Chat). A famous example is the 55,000-word Doom FAQ written by then 14- year-old student Hank Leukart. Personal and community communication between FPS gamers was made possible through Usenet and IRC. Both multiplayer gaming and an active mod development scene continued and grew through id’s subsequent titles: Doom II (1994), Quake (1996), Quake II (1997) and Quake III Arena (1999), and the development of competing FPS titles, such as Unreal (1998) and Half-Life (1999). The popularity of multiplayer FPS gaming saw the development of clans (groups of gamers who play together as a team – both in online games and at real-life LAN meetings) and a shift towards team-based games, which are now by far the most popular (eg Half-Life Counter-Strike (1999), Medal of Honor Allied Assault (2001), Battlefield 1942 (2002). CURRENT MANIFESTATIONS OF THE FPS GAMING COMMUNITY Online game servers, while used primarily for gameplay, are also a social venue for gamers. Players may type messages to each other in the game, and indeed this is an important part of strategic communication, especially in team games. Players also chat, educate each other in the finer points of gameplay, and exchange abuse, jokes and information, depending on the level of seriousness of the game. It is possible to talk as much in an online FPS game as in IRC, although excessive chatter may be frowned upon, and ‘spamming’ (excessive text messaging) can cause a player to be silenced or ‘kicked’ from the game. Players may join a server game just to talk to a friend, or to invite players to another server. In-game voice communication has been made possible in recent years by ancillary programs, again developed by gamers, (such as BattleCom, which was later purchased by Microsoft to make GameVoice) and has been incorporated in some recent games such as Tribes2. There are thousands of websites devoted to FPS gaming: gaming news and reviews sites (eg Blue’s News http://www.bluesnews.com/), online league and game ladder sites (for both individuals and clans) such as the Online Gamers League (http://www.worldogl.com/) and BarrysWorld (http://leagues.barrysworld.net/), individual clan pages (which provide clan information and contact details for match challenges), to large multi-purpose portals such as PlanetQuake (http://www.planetquake.com/) or the Australian AusGamers site (http://www.ausgamers.com/), which are used by the community to report news, exchange information, publicise LAN meetings and online competitions, download software and files (latest patches, maps, models, skins, sounds) and provide hosting for hundreds of smaller clan and special-interest websites (AusGamers alone hosts some 2500 clan pages and claims 65,000 registered members). Many of the larger sites host discussion forums where news items, gaming and technical subjects and a wide variety of other issues may be discussed, and provide real-time chat and links to associated IRC channels. Webpages are the public face of the game community, and provide education resources for players in gameplay strategies, tactics, etiquette, game customisation, development, and allow discussion and debate of these issues. They also allow special interest groups within the gaming community to have an online presence and voice in the community, such www.gamegirlz.com, which raises issues faced by the relatively small number of female players in the FPS scene, and general issues of gender and computer gaming. IRC is still popular with FPS gamers, for chat, clan meetings, technical support, game and social organisation, and FTP (file transfer) access, but not as much as in its heyday when it was one of the few technologies providing real-time communication and access to FTP sites. The release of the highly anticipated first Quake test in February 1996 saw an IRC record set for the largest channel ever, of 1556 users on EFNet#quake – 10% of the total number of IRC users at the time [4]. In 1999 the IRC network EnterTheGame was established by members of the gaming community to offer gamers a better place to gather and chat, setup matches, and meet like-minded people on- line. Instant messaging programs (eg ICQ, Trillian) are popular for chat between individuals or small groups. Gaming-specific communication technologies have also been developed by the FPS gaming community. One of the most notable is GameSpy, a server- query utility that was developed by gamers (beginning as QSpy